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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Muslims in Pop Culture.”

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The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 46: Muslims in Pop Culture appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image from the Hulu series Ramy)

The following excerpt comes from Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media (Indiana University Press, 2024) by Rosemary Pennington. The book explores depictions of Muslims and of Islam in American popular culture.

The following excerpt comes from the book’s conclusion.

***

Muslim communities in the United States often find themselves the subject of surveillance by both government and cultural forces. Imagined as criminal or terrorist threats, they have seen their mosques infiltrated by law enforcement, their names placed on no-fly lists, their right to build places of worship denied out of fear. They have to ask for their holidays to be recognized, for their children to not be fed pork at school, for their right to simply exist in America. The danger they sometimes face simply for being Muslim is real and oppressive. And, yet, so many individuals do not shy away from making their identities visible. For some, to be visible is a purposefully and overtly political act. For others, it is simply an attempt to live their lives as authentically as they can (though one might argue that, itself, is a political act).

Pierre Bourdieu noted that for members of minority groups debates about identity and belonging are often “struggles over the monopoly of the power to make people see and believe, to get them to know and recognize, to impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world and, thereby, to make and unmake groups.” For American Muslims, the struggle for visibility is partly to ensure they are not erased from the American public sphere. It is a struggle to make an American identity that includes Muslim experiences. Edward Said wrote that “Self-definition is one of the activities practiced by all cultures: it has a rhetoric, a set of occasions and authorities … and a familiarity all its own.” American Muslims want to participate in the process of American self-definition as they seek recognition that Muslims belong to and in the United States. It is a struggle to force the United States to live up to its lofty rhetoric of being a land that welcomes everyone. If that’s truly to be the case, then everyone must be involved in the making of what it means to be American. This is one of the narrative threads in the second season of the Hulu show Ramy.

The sophomore season begins as the main character returns from a disastrous trip to visit family in Egypt, hoping to find some direction for his life. Upon his return, Ramy Youssef connects with a sheik, played by Mahershala Ali, in order to reconnect with Islam as he works to create a meaningful American Muslim life. The second season of the show also features storylines focused on Ramy’s sister and mother, giving viewers insight into the lives of Muslim women who do not apologize for their faith. In the case of Ramy’s mother, viewers even get to see a Muslim immigrant on her path to American citizenship. In the program Islam is a lived religion set against a New Jersey backdrop and Youssef, playing an avatar of himself, works to unmake an understanding of America that is hegemonically white and Christian and remake it to be more reflective of the country’s multiracial, multiethnic, and multireligious reality. Youssef helps make visible an accessible American Muslim experience. However, even with the success of shows like Ramy and comic books like Ms. Marvel, the work toward inclusion is fraught and complicated.

For Michel Foucault, the danger in becoming visible lies in the possibility of being trapped by the expectations of the viewers. Even if you are seeking to be your most authentic self, there is a feeling of some pressure to not be so much yourself that you run afoul of those who would deem you “normal” or “safe.” Our performances of self in this environment are “individualized and constantly visible” and, for Muslims, can often reinforce what Nabil Echchaibi calls the “double burden of representation.” Muslims often find themselves in a position to defend their faith from accusations of it somehow being violent or promoting terrorism or oppressing others and in that defense, Echchaibi suggests, lies a trap. It puts Muslims in a position of suggesting that perhaps some interpretations of Islam are problematic as they seek to convince us that not all Muslims are violent. Muslims are pushed to publicly recognize the “humanity and inhumanity” of their communities while the non-Muslims they are speaking to rarely are. We often hear people proclaim that “not all Muslims are violent” or “not all Muslims hate the West,” but rarely do we hear echoed back “not all Americans believe Muslims are violent” or “not all Americans believe Muslims are dangerous.” Becoming visible, in this instance, reinforces the representational cage that traps Muslims and Islam in a stereotyped understanding of what the two are. It’s a trap that many American Muslim producers and creators are all too aware of as they work to create media that both reflects their experiences, but also is accessible to a broad American audience. That certainly seems to be true of comedian Hasan Minaj. During an interview promoting the third season of his show Patriot Act on Netflix, Minaj was asked how his background – he is the Muslim Indian American son of immigrants – has shaped his particular approach to comedy.

I’m an Indian American Muslim. I’m always reminded of that. And as a result, I’ve always had an insider-outsider relationship with America. I’m a citizen, and I grew up here and loved it as any American kid would. But at the same time, there have been moments when I’ve felt like, man… I’m an outsider regardless of what’s on my birth certificate. I don’t fit in at the party.

Seemingly part of Minaj’s mission is to make space for himself and others like him to exist in the American imagination. To force a recognition of the experiences of American Muslims as American. What would it be like for Muslims like Minaj to not be reminded of their outsider status? To not be seen as outsiders at all? At the close of a conference called Cyber Muslims, Nabil Echchaibi asked what would it mean for Muslims to not feel a “compulsion to represent,” to not have to be constantly concerned about how they are being understood.

It’s an idea that Kamala Khan wrestles with in the second issue of the Ms. Marvel relaunch, after she has spent some time embodying Carol Danvers’s version of Ms. Marvel. Reflecting on her experience, Kamala thinks to herself, “…being someone else isn’t liberating. It’s exhausting.” After spending seemingly years wanting to feel more “normal,” wanting to not have to worry about how her Muslim identity is being understood by non-Muslims, Kamala realizes that she should be enough; that her experience as an American Muslim is meaningful enough, heroic enough. In a just world, no one would be forced to fit into a mold in order to be understood and included; they would simply be accepted as they are. Muslims would be allowed, as Echchaibi suggested, to “just live.” It’s the hope of such a world Kamala begins to work toward in her role as Ms. Marvel. It’s the expectation of such a world that seems to drive the work of Muslim comedians, actors, and reality show contestants. But, for now, it is seemingly more a hope than a reality.

(Image source: Marvel comics)

The representations of Muslims explored in this book are not studies in fidelity or truth – they are not representations designed to suggest that one way of being Muslim is truer or more honest than another. They are representations designed to help the audience understand what it means to be Muslim in America; what it means to be an American Muslim. In the case of Marvel’s Kamala Khan, being an American Muslim means finding a way to reconcile the expectations of family, community, and self in a way that feels true to herself. In Ms. Marvel’s second series, Kamala struggles with the fact that she is now a known entity, people know she’s out there, fighting for the common good. “Now I’m some kind of symbol,” she says, “and I don’t have any say in what it means.” What Kamala is struggling with is the fact that, no matter what she does, she cannot control how people will respond to her; she has no control over what she means to other people. Kamala has been transformed in the minds of the public from superhero to the meaning of superhero. Eventually she reconciles herself to the fact that all she can do is to continue to do good as best she can, to live her life as authentically as she can, and to hope that it is enough.

The Muslim representations appearing in primetime TV dramas are often heroic in their own ways. Lost’s Sayyid constantly fights against the expectations of others that he will be violent, American Crime’s Aliyah fights against an unjust justice system that seems to presume her brother’s guilt, and The Night Of’s Naz fights against a system that would transform him into the violent caricature it expects him to be – a battle he seemingly loses in the end. All of these representations working to help audiences understand what it means that Muslims are continually associated with violence, that they are continually framed as enemy others. Comedians, of course, can poke fun as such stereotypes. They can throw them back at the audience, expose the racist foundations upon which they are built, and force the audience to laugh at the absurdities of such stereotypes and their own perpetuation of them. Together, the comedian and their audience can remake the boundaries marking us and other, even if for just a moment. All of this working to reshape the meaning of Muslim in the American imagination.

When it comes to representations of “real” Muslims, things get trickier. There is some expectation that not only is it a representation of the Muslim experience, not only is it meant to signify in some way what it means to be an American Muslim, but these representations are imagined to somehow be true to life or authentic. They are expected to be both tree and meaning. For contestants on American reality TV shows, if what they produce is not judged authentic – and by authentic, the judges mean tied in some way to the contestants’ ethnic or religious identity – then they are castigated for conforming in an attempt to get ahead. Of course, what this critique ignores are the histories that have forced members of marginalized or minority groups to attempt to assimilate, to attempt to erase those things that made them stand out, in order to survive in an American culture defined by a white, Protestant experience. One way to become nonthreatening, to be woven into the fabric of the culture, is to produce things that can be consumed or to become consumable yourself. When Fatima Ali was criticized for her food not being authentic, when Ayana Ife was celebrated for foregrounding modesty in her clothing designs, when magazines featured Muslim women in Dubai who watch Desperate Housewives and shop for designer goods, it was all designed to help sell these Muslim women to a broad American audience. To make them, their stories, and what they produce something that could be bought or sold. What does it mean to be real when that realness is predicated on whether an audience or a panel of judges buys into your performance of your identity?

Rosemary Pennington is Associate Professor of Journalism in Miami University’s Department of Media, Journalism & Film. She is the author of Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media.

***

Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 46 of the Revealer podcast: “Muslims in Pop Culture.”

The post From Ms. Marvel to Ramy: Muslims in American Media appeared first on The Revealer.

(We Live Here: The Midwest promotional poster. Image source: Hulu)

“I desperately miss the church,” Des Moines resident Katie Chiaramonte shares, tearing up. Forcing a laugh, she continues, “There’s like a lot of emotion attached to it. I gave a significant amount of my life to the church because I love the people so much.”

Katie’s wife Nia came out as a trans woman and transitioned after they married and had children. But Katie says people rarely ask her about religion as a queer woman in the Midwest. In Hulu’s 2023 documentary We Live Here: The Midwest, Katie and four other families not only challenge the myth that LGBTQ people do not live in the region, but also that they aren’t religious. LGBTQ Midwesterners have existed and continue to exist and thrive in Midwestern states and in religious communities, despite sometimes facing violence and religious prejudice.

We Are Here: The Midwest is not the first work to document and celebrate queer Midwestern experiences. In the 2019 book Real Queer America: LGBTQ Stories from Red States, trans reporter Samantha Allen shares her love for the “flyover” states and the LGBTQ people who choose to stay and pioneer queer communities in conservative religious and political spaces. Similarly, in 2021’s Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America, Ryan Schuessler and Kevin Whiteneir, Jr. weave together stories of queer religious struggle and joy.

The 52-minute documentary We Live Here: The Midwest, directed by Melinda Maerker and produced by David Clayton Miller, takes a similar approach and features five queer partners and families. The first, Nia and Katie Chiaramonte, a trans woman and queer woman living with their five children in Iowa, struggle to find a community after facing bigotry at their church.

In contrast, Mario and Monte Foreman-Powell, Black gay men living with their baby daughter in Nebraska, were surprised to find a support network among their neighbors. However, despite meeting each other in a Colorado church where Mario was the music director and Monte a singer, Mario lost his job when his pastor forced him to come out. This was the second time Monte was pushed out of a church position because of his sexuality.

Farming lesbian couple Denise and Courtney Skeeba from Kansas tell viewers there is something inherently queer about the Midwest, specifically how many Midwestern women, according to the stereotype, dress and present as butch. They also share how their son was bullied so intensely that they took him out of public school.

Bullying was also a theme for Russell Exlos-Raber, a married gay man in Ohio, who shared his own experiences with bullying and with the bullying he has witnessed at the school where he teaches. In response, Exlos-Raber has hosted discussion groups a prom for LGBTQ students at his school.

Finally, Debb and Jenn Richmond, a trans couple in Minnesota, recount the transphobia they encountered within their own families. Jenn’s sons threatened to murder her. Debb’s daughters struggled with how her transition unsettled the family, later accepting her back into the family even though they still call her “dad.”

Through each of these stories, the documentary highlights how finding and sustaining community is a big part of why LGBTQ people either stay or leave the Midwest. In many Midwestern places, community is closely tied to local churches, synagogues, and mosques, so being cast out of these communities, as three families in the documentary describe, is a crippling loss. At the same time, LGBTQ Midwesterners are forming their own communities or fighting for reform and visibility inside communities who continue to hurt them.

Taking Up Space as a Queer Midwesterner

As a queer woman who grew up in a Chicago suburb and graduated from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, I have spent several years reflecting on what it means to be a queer Midwesterner, and even more a religious queer Midwesterner. I came out to myself early in college, but I waited to come out to family and friends after I moved to Washington, DC for safety reasons. In the wake of the 2016 election, Trump supporters drove across my campus, one of the most liberal areas in the region and one with a visible queer presence, and threw eggs and bottles at students.

For much of my life, I bought into the stereotype that these identities—queer, Midwestern, and religious—were incongruous. But as an undergraduate, coming face to face with people challenging this assumption helped me to dismantle this stereotype.

I participated in a research study where I documented the stories of other queer people in Muncie and the wider Midwest. I documented these histories in the 2021 Muncie-based exhibition Midwestern Stories. I also conducted oral history interviews with religious LGBTQ folx, religious allies, and queer people who distanced themselves from religion as part of the Muncie LGBTQ+ History Project. The interviews affirmed my understanding of the Midwest as a place largely dominated by traditional gender values that can restrict the rights and survival of queer families.

But at the same time, these conversations challenged my perspective of the Midwest and showed me how queer people can thrive in Middle America. And because of the importance of religion in community making, I quickly discovered how queer religious communities can also flourish in the heartland.

Leading and Creating Affirming Religious Spaces

The documentary opens with Katie and Nia discussing living in Iowa and how closely Christianity is integrated into Midwestern culture. The pair were childhood best friends, both intimately involved in their churches. When they first began to date, in line with their churches’ teachings, they dated to marry. The pair eventually tied the knot and had five children before Nia came out as trans. Both before and after Nia’s transition, Katie regularly preached at their non-denominational evangelical church as a layperson.

“When I came out,” Nia explained, “all the energy got focused onto Katie and her preaching. Nobody would outright say something that was transphobic, but it was, ‘Katie your theology is bad.’” Instead of saying they were bothered by a trans person in the church or a queer couple with a prominent position within their community, members of her church argued that Katie’s approach to Christianity was faulty, and that she was less of a Christian. But the only thing about her or her preaching that had changed was her support of Nia.

Continuing her relationship with Nia is what made her a “bad” Christian to her fellow churchgoers, Katie explains. But she disagrees, arguing instead that Jesus held unconditional love for and reached out to marginalized communities. “And it utterly breaks my heart that my unconditional love for Nia,” Katie shared, “was the thing that had to break my relationship with the church because, for me, it is the church. Like, for me, this is my religion. This is my faith. This kind of love.”

Nia says she found spiritual community elsewhere. “I have found community in other places, that is the thing that the church really gave me, and the thing that I loved about church was the relationship, and I think God is relationship, and so, to me, you know, finding that in other places is finding God elsewhere.”

Katie and Nia’s story highlights how, despite religious prejudice, religion remains an important part of some queer people’s lives. Some even find and establish religious communities of their own. Katie specifically speaks to this point in the documentary, showcasing how LGBTQ individuals have created queer religious communities like the aChurch4Me Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago, Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin, Soulforce in Minnesota, and The Church Within in Indianapolis.

Rebelling by Staying in the Midwest

Today, many parts of the Midwest are increasingly rightwing and Christian nationalist. Republican politicians are pushing for anti-LGBTQ legislation and denying queer Midwesterners the rights to bathrooms, sports, drivers licenses, and gender affirming care in line with their gender identity. Today, there are 489 anti-LGBTQ bills on the docket, the majority concentrated in Midwestern states.

Everyone in the documentary has the choice: do you stay and commit to building your community at a time when LGBTQ people are losing legal rights at an alarming rate, or do you leave?

In Nia’s opinion, leaving would mean the anti-LGBTQ lawmakers and their supporters won. The conservative bigots would have effectively cast out another trans and queer person from the Midwest. Staying in the Midwest means that anti-LGBTQ politicians and their supporters have failed.

This sentiment is also shared by LGBTQ people who remain in explicitly or implicitly homophobic communities. Some stay because they have no other community. Others, however, fight for their rights and recognition in homophobic religious communities and hold their ground.

Queer Midwesterners, like the five families in the documentary, affirm that despite growing conservatism, LGBTQ people come from and exist in the heartland and that they are there to stay. Even more, they join a decades-long tradition of queer people and queer religious Midwesterners carving out their own safe queer spaces.

As I watched this documentary, I realized why it was important for me to proclaim my identities as queer, religious, and Midwestern. Just like everyone featured in We Live Here, my existence and visibility have the potential to make the Midwest safer and more inclusive.

Queer, religious Midwesterners exist and they are not going away.

Emma Cieslik is a freelance writer and museum worker based in the Washington, DC area.

The post Queer and Religious in the Midwest appeared first on The Revealer.

(Mount Popa in Myanmar. Image source: Travel Authentic Asia)

On the morning of December 26, 2023, a willowy transgender woman huddled on a carpet in front of a wooden structure resembling a house, the size of a telephone booth, placed at the bottom of a giant fig tree in a village bordering Mount Popa National Park in central Myanmar. Her wavy hair was tied in a top knot, her eyes closed and hands supplicating in prayer. A group of people knelt around her in reverence, all draped in traditional Burmese attire. Not long afterwards she donned a purple gaung baung (turban), and danced to a series of slow beats that gradually sped up. The moment ended with her entering a trance-like state.

The assembled group was consecrating a nat shrine, called nat kun or nat sin in Burmese, and the trans woman was acting as a nat kadaw, a spirit medium. A nat, also called deva, is a spirit, and traditionally the Burmese believed in a wide array of spirits. The spirits are capable of protecting people when appeased and of causing harm when ignored or offended. Nats are terrestrial beings tied to the landscape.

The trans woman, a professional spirit medium, was hired by Mahagiri—a local non-profit group working for environmental conservation in the Mount Popa National Park—to consecrate multiple abandoned nat shrines in the fringe areas of the park. Founded in 2020 and named after Min Mahagiri (The Lord of the Great Mountain), the principal nat of Mount Popa, the organization has about a dozen young people as its members. Tin Ko Min, a 35-year-old local grassroots conservationist trained in geology, helms the organization.

Mount Popa National Park is located in Myanmar’s central dry zone, a desert-like region characterized by prickly bushes and stunted trees. One of the country’s most climate-sensitive regions, here Mount Popa’s fifty-square-mile lush forests are often likened to an oasis. The forests are not only the primary carbon sinks in the region, but also prominent biodiversity hotspots. The park hosts a total of 279 species, including the critically endangered Popa langur (Trachypithecus popa). Though these forests were designated as a national park in 1989, forest law enforcement never seriously took effect here, making informal conservation efforts even more important.

As the climate crisis hits the region, Mahagiri banks on the traditional beliefs in nats to protect the local ecology and address the climate crisis. As part of a local climate change mitigation strategy, the group is reviving the abandoned nat shrines scattered throughout Mount Popa. “Thanks to our ancestors’ beliefs, people here eschew despoiling the dwellings of nats,” Tin Ko Min tells me. “Therefore, reviving nat shrines is a good strategy to safeguard trees and forests that sequester carbon.”

Turning to religion, these climate change activists hope to provide long-term protection for a critical segment of the environment in Burma and contribute towards addressing the global climate crisis.

The Animist Nat Cult of Myanmar

In Myanmar, a majority of the population is Buddhist. A significant number of Buddhists also follow the animist nat cult that possibly predates Buddhism. The official pantheon of nats consists of thirty-seven deities called Thong Ze Khunna Min, meaning “thirty-seven spirit lords.” In addition, there are hundreds of local deities and ancestor spirits that share the landscape with human and non-human beings. Once revered on par with Buddhism, today the nat cult survives as a subculture away from Myanmar’s urban centers dominated by orthodox Buddhism.

On a breezy evening in September 2023, months before they started reviving nat shrines, I visited the office of Mahagiri, a two-story house with teak floors typical of Myanmar homes of the past. As we walked around Popaywa, located at the foothills of Mount Popa, Tin Ko Min told me that in the past the Burmese worshiped the nats of wind, fire, metals, earth, thunder, clouds, mountains, forests, the house, and so on. “Our ancestors believed everything is alive and sentient.”

(Nat statues on Mount Popa. Image source: insideasiatours.com)

“The tree spirit is called Yokkaso, the earth spirit Bumaso, and the sky spirit Akathaso. Yokkaso lives in the trunks of trees, Bumaso lives in the roots of trees, and Akathaso lives in the tops of trees,” Tin Ko Min explained. “All these nats need trees to live in. The more we cut trees, the more we offend them.”

Louis Vossion, a late nineteenth century traveller in Burma, noted in an 1891 article about the rural Burma nat cult in the Journal of American Folklore, “[When] a traveller comes across a big tree he never fails to deposit an offering of flowers and rice at its feet, in case it is the residence of a special nat. If no special nat resides there, the nat of the forest will appreciate his intention and protect him on his way.”

This is an “immanenist” worldview, one marked by the attempt to call upon spirits and deities to assist life in the here and now: to ensure wellbeing, to make the fields fertile, and the sick healthy. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has suggested that in immanentist cultures, people believe spirits or deities determine human success or ruin and grant powers to those who are devoted to them. In traditional Burmese culture, nats determine human fate.

The Enchanted Forests of Mount Popa: Myanmar’s Mount Olympus 

For centuries Mount Popa has been Myanmar’s Mount Olympus, as the country’s most powerful nats, including the Thong Ze Khunna Min, are believed to reside here. At the summit of a mountain called Taung Kalat in Mount Popa is the throne of Min Mahagiri, the highest of these nats. In addition, hundreds of local nats are believed to dwell throughout the landscape. The evidence of these beliefs is abundantly visible in the nat shrines and prayer rags tied to tree branches and the altars at the bases of tree trunks. On a recent hike in the forests of Mount Popa, Tin Ko Min found a nat statue carved in wood under a tree. “The statue was sitting upright. It looked energetic,” he told me over Zoom. “It’s a Maung Yokkaso Thitpin Saung Nat [Yokkaso tree guardian spirit].”

While Popa is the abode of all the thirty-seven spirit lords as well as hundreds of local spirits, two regional nats are specially supplicated in the region: Min Mahagiri and the Mother Goddess of Mt. Popa, Popa Medaw Ma Wunna, an ogress who only eats flowers.

(A Nat spirit medium in Myanmar lighting a cigarette. Image source: Mariette Pathy Allen)

Sai Nor Khay, a retired professor of history from Mandalay University, says Burmese kings recognised Min Mahagiri as the “spiritual owner” of Mount Popa. The professor drew my attention to a royal order by King Bodawphaya, the longest reigning monarch of Burma’s last dynasty. The order issued on November 12, 1806 stated:

Build a special pavilion to make offerings to Thong Ze Khunna Min– thirty-seven spirits, and ask Popa Mahagiri, who is one of the thirty seven, why he doesn’t help to get the Poppa white elephant captured quickly.

The king sought help from Min Mahagiri to capture a coveted white elephant, a precious symbol in Buddhist kingship.

In a lecture delivered at the Centre for Burma Studies in Northern Illinois University in 1987, U Nu, Myanmar’s first prime minister, related an anecdote of how a seepage in the Taungpulu dam in Mount Popa could not be fixed until Min Mahagiri was formally appeased through a spirit medium. “All projects and functions, big and small, in the area, were preceded by propitiation to Mahagiri nat.”

Philosopher David Abram suggests that in worldviews like that of the traditional Burmese, people find themselves in “an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that speaks.”

Mainstream Buddhist Environmentalism

But not everyone in Myanmar subscribes to these ideas. Buddhists, especially elite and urbanite adherents, tend to reject traditional immanenist Burmese ideas as superstitions. Orthodox Buddhist monks have expressed disdain and rejected nat worship as “un-Buddhist.” One such monk, U Wisetkhana, has written a Burmese-language booklet, “Protecting the Race and Religion,” arguing that nat worship is evil. Spirit mediums in Burma have reported incidents of shouting, threats, and physical destruction of holy objects in nat shrines since 2014.

Not all educated Buddhists have opposed the nat cult, though. U Nu, the first prime minister of Myanmar and a devout Buddhist, believed nat worship and Buddhism were compatible by the Buddhist law of karma. “Devas [nat] help some [people] sometimes,” he said. “If a person has [done] kusala kamma [meritorious deed], he must get help from the deva, even though he does not apply for it.”

Nevertheless, most conservationist groups in Myanmar, especially those in urban areas, draw inspiration from the Buddhist environmental ethics rather than nat animism. The key Buddhist doctrine of paticca-samuppada (interdependence) expounds that all beings are interconnected, and that nothing exists in isolation.

“The principle of paticca-samuppada advocates care for all beings around us including forests and wildlife,” says Ven. Devindabhipala, senior lecturer in Buddhist Sociology at the Shan State Buddhist University in Myanmar. To drive home his point, the scholar and monk cites Samudda-Vanija-Jataka, a canonical Buddhist story on humanity’s environmental responsibility. “In this Jataka, we see a community living on an island being punished by the gods for destroying the island’s environment. The Buddha attempted to explain that it is the responsibility of the people to take care of their environment. To care for the environment is a meritorious deed.”

But, according to Tin Ko Min and his colleagues at Mahagiri, this strand of environmentalism only advocates protection of nature as a duty for fear of karmic retribution, and not for nature’s own sake. In Myanmar’s mainstream environmental discourses, there is little recognition of the environmental values embedded in the animist nat cult.

Reviving Nat Shrines to Protect Mount Popa

In contrast to the mainstream Buddhist environmentalism of Myanmar, Mahagiri’s conservation work is inspired by traditional Burmese nat animism, where the world is believed to be enspirited and enchanted. That is, nature in its various forms is endowed with life and consciousness and hence it should be respected and treated on par with humans.

Tin Ko Min told me that compared to many other protected areas across Myanmar, forests in Mount Popa are in relatively better shape although agricultural expansion still poses a threat to the park. The reason, he said, is that locals respect and fear the nats of Mount Popa. “Nats are thought to be owners of these territories, where humans are not expected to interfere without their permission.”

Mahagiri began their climate action with a series of local initiatives such as screening wildlife documentaries for kids, taking them on nature walks in the park, and organizing awareness campaigns on the critically endangered Popa langur. They worked in villages to increase environmental literacy, underscoring the importance of protecting the local ecology and the need for proper waste management and the reduction of plastic use.

But they soon realized that nothing could be as effective as reviving forgotten and abandoned nat shrines scattered throughout Mount Popa. Hundreds of nat shrines dot the national park.

“Revival of a nat kun sanctifies the area of the shrine and its surrounding forests,” Tin Ko Min explains to me. “People do not violate these spaces. Anyone who respects our ancestors’ beliefs refrains from polluting these places.”

In December 2023, they cleaned several nat kuns that had previously fallen into disuse and had a few of them consecrated by the trans woman spirit medium they hired. Later, they also organized a nat appeasing ceremony in a nearby nat kun that is believed to date back several centuries. They have plans to revive more nat shrines and to organize traditional nat festivals called nat pwe to make younger people aware of the nat cult.

Tin Ko Min and his colleagues have also harnessed local people’s reverence and fear for Min Mahagiri to deter people from littering in the national park. They’ve put up a poster in the local Burmese language on the road to the park that reads:

We’ve prayed to Min Mahagiri with offerings of banana, coconut and betel nuts asking to give appropriate punishment to visitors who litter Mount Popa with plastic waste. So carry back your plastic waste.

“For most people in Mount Popa, the fear of facing the wrath of nats in this life is more immediate than karmic retribution in future lives,” Tin Ko Min said. “I really believe Min Mahagiri punishes those who litter his body.”

For the members of Mahagiri, the revival of nat shrines is not merely a matter of conservation, but a sincere practice of nat animism. “From time to time, we go to the shrine of Min Mahagiri in Taung Kalat and beg for protection and blessings for our endeavors.”

Further expounding their beliefs, Tin Ko Min said, “We live close to nature while most people choose to live without destroying nature. There’s a big difference between the two.” And an important aspect of living close to nature, he explained, is seeing the forest as their ancestors saw it: as a living person.

“We need to communicate with our ancestors.”

Bikash Kumar Bhattacharya is an independent journalist and researcher with bylines in YES! Magazine, LGBTQ Nation, BuzzFeed, Earth Island Journal, Mongabay, The Third Pole, and The Diplomat among others. He has reported from northeast India, Myanmar, and Timor-Leste. His writings can be found at https://www.bikashkbhattacharya.com/.

The post Reviving Burmese Nat Shrines to Protect Myanmar’s Mount Popa National Park appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: newsclick.in)

Early in April 2024, India’s top educational body quietly made changes to millions of school textbooks. Key amongst these changes was the removal of references to the Babri mosque, a medieval mosque publicly demolished in 1992 by far-right Hindu nationalists, who believed the mosque’s location was home to a former temple dedicated to the Hindu deity Lord Ram. The extra-judicial demolition of the Babri mosque, and construction of a new Hindu temple in its spot, has been central to the growth and success of the country’s Hindu nationalist tilt, and rise of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in power today.

Barely three months after Modi inaugurated the Ram temple in a widely publicized event, the country’s premier advisory body tasked with drafting textbooks removed multiple references to the mosque and its demolition from political science curricula. The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has long been at the forefront of guiding school syllabi and drafting content used by more than 40 million students annually.

But as India shifts further to the right, bodies like the NCERT, and the country’s schooling at large, have been collateral damage in an increasingly Hindu majoritarian polity. Schools are now, more than ever, being used to influence the minds of millions of children, with history and science as the most frequently targeted subjects for revisionism.

Educators across the country are taking note and voicing concerns. Apoorvanand, a scholar and professor of Hindi at Delhi University, alleged that there is a concerted effort by the current government to impose their version of history on young minds.

“In their distorted version of history, our ancient past was a golden era; then Muslims came and ruined everything, then the (non-BJP) governments after the independence did nothing and all the work is being done by this government only. This reflects in their understanding of science as well where they want to establish that we had already invented all the scientific equipment in our ancient past,” he said.

Mornings in a Delhi-based branch of the Saraswati Bal Mandir school are a case in point. Before classes begin each day, the school makes students participate in thirty minutes of Sanskrit prayers worshiping Hindu gods. It’s a routine exercise, now followed by thousands of schools across the country.

Several schools that provide affordable and accessible education to millions of children are run by a vast chain of institutions called Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a far-right ideological organization and precursor to the country’s BJP Party.

Across India, there is a growing sense of segregation in the classroom, where once-secular institutions now find themselves teaching texts replete with omissions and revisions. Meanwhile, schools run by Christians and Muslims now find themselves under overt attack. Authorities have cracked down upon missionary and convent-run schools that are otherwise popularly sought-after for an English-style education. Elsewhere, school teachers and staff have faced suspension and threats based on allegations of “forced conversions.” Across India, religious minorities (Muslims and Christians in particular) have been targeted frequently with allegations of forcefully attempting to lure others to convert by fraud or deceit. More than twelve Indian states, almost all governed by the BJP, have legislation that criminalizes such forced conversions, and rightwing vigilante groups often press false charges of “forced conversion” to threaten, intimidate, or even arrest Muslims and Christians.

As the country heads towards a critical election year, and as the far-right BJP pushes its idea of a “Hindu First” India, changes in school syllabi and the educational climate are critical to influencing millions of impressionable young people. Through these curricular initiatives, the BJP is working to ensure India will have a Hindu nationalist future.

“Vedic” Science and Rewriting History

Students in RSS-backed schools are not merely told to chant Hindu prayers in morning assemblies, they are even reportedly instructed do leave their shoes outside their classrooms – a practice no different from entry into a Hindu temple. Yet, an additional concern lies in what these supposedly secular schools teach.

Last year, news emerged that Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as concepts like electromagnetism and discussions on the sustainable use of natural resources, were removed from science textbooks across the country. At the same time, state-run schools are increasingly attempting to bring in subjects like “Vedic mathematics” and “Vedic science,” using what is being pushed as a more indigenous or “decolonial” pedagogy, but is in reality the propounding of Hindu mythological and creationist ideas.

While the education system is erasing accepted scientific theories, they are also purging history textbooks of information about the country’s Mughal rulers (seen as Muslim), and references to a syncretic historical landscape where people with differing religious practices peacefully comingled. Multiple sections in high school history textbooks no longer describe the achievements of the country’s Mughal rulers and Delhi Sultanate, almost as if to minimize their contributions to the country’s culture, trade, archaeology, and their legacy today.

Several of the country’s most famous monuments, including the celebrated Taj Mahal, were built by the Mughals, who also fostered significant trade ties, created a legal lexicon, patronized artisans and literature, and more. The Mughal empire ruled over a substantial portion of the Indian subcontinent for centuries. But right-wing Hindus see them as foreign invaders who looted and plundered Indian and Hindu civilization.

(Image source: Tarushi Aswani)

“Our students will lag behind students of other countries as a curriculum based on Hindu nationalism will limit their knowledge and understanding. No country’s aim is to produce nationalists from schools and it should not be. The goal of the schools should be to educate kids. But the goal of India’s education system is now to produce nationalists,” Apoorvanand cautioned.

This erasure has been accompanied by history and political science books removing references to the connections between Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, and the RSS, the ideological parent to the BJP. Government-appointed authorities have studiously omitted Godse’s links to Hindu supremacist thought while only retaining the fact that he was Gandhi’s killer. They have also purged the curriculum of sections that spoke of the anti-Muslim 2002 pogrom, where Muslims were disproportionately targeted in the Indian state of Gujarat—then helmed by Narendra Modi as its Chief Minister.

Pawan (name changed to protect identity), a leading educator from New Delhi, recalled that the NCERT textbooks in India have been revised before, but not at this pace and scale. “First, this government revised the textbooks in the name of reducing the load on students due to Covid. Now this is a new strategy. At least earlier, they only cut some portions of the textbooks…But now they are changing the content of the textbooks without even rationalizing it,” he told us. 

Monopolizing Young Minds and India’s Schools

The country’s rightward march isn’t only reflected in changes to syllabi and textbooks, but also in the overhaul of formerly secular institutions. For example, military training schools are being privatized, and their transformation is a religious one.

In April 2024, an investigation revealed that an autonomous body of cadet schools run under the country’s Ministry of Defense had allowed private actors to partner with these schools and even open their own to train young military services aspirants. Several of these schools are now run by far-right Hindu organizations, leaders of the BJP, or its allies.

But the problem is not only at military schools. Today, schools for and run by minority religious and ethnic communities that were once protected thanks to provisions in the Indian constitution, find themselves facing unconstitutional oversight. Chief among these are the country’s premier Christian institutions.

The Catholic church is said to run nearly 14,000 schools, 650 colleges, seven universities, five medical colleges, and 450 technical and vocational institutions in India. Meanwhile, Protestant churches and other Christian groups are believed to operate another 30,000 schools, making it nearly 50,000 such educational institutions in India. Many of these schools and colleges are widely regarded as some of the best in the country, with leading academics, politicians, economists, policymakers, writers, journalists, and public intellectuals across religious backgrounds having hailed from a Christian-run alma mater.

The Indian Constitution’s provision of Article 30 allows all religious and linguistic minorities to run their own educational institutions. John Dayal, a senior journalist turned activist who works on religious and caste oppression, believes that Christian schools and Islamic madrasas (centers for Muslim learning), “have in fact been the neutral schools we’ve had, because the gurukuls [ancient Indian learning system modeled on the idea of a guru and disciple] that existed in pre-modern times were only for the upper-caste Brahmins and Kshatriyas.” This ancient learning system often excluded the oppressed castes and other non-Hindu groups.

Yet, a palpable fear is slowly becoming evident. The Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) recently issued a comprehensive set of guidelines for what they dubbed as the “emerging challenges due to the current socio-cultural, religious, and political situation” in the country.

At the core of the guidelines, Dayal notes that there are now directions such as not “forcing Christian traditions on students of other religions.” Pointing to how Hindu nationalists are villainizing Christian schools for allegedly promoting religious conversions, Dayal highlighted how many of the country’s supposedly secular schools have long taught students only about Hindu independence fighters, included Hindu iconography in classrooms, and even encouraged Hindu songs and prayers in morning assemblies. Despite this, the CBCI now encourages schools to have students engage in a collective reading of the Preamble to the Indian Constitution, amidst growing fearmongering that these schools encourage “forced conversions” into Christianity.

In indigenous and tribal-dominated and forest areas of India, vigilante attacks against Christian-run schools have been on the rise. Priests have been instructed to put up statues of Hindu deities at the gates of their schools. Meanwhile, in the country’s border state of Assam, a Hindu nationalist group told Christian schools they had two weeks to remove all Christian symbols.

With violence and revisionism on the rise, anti-Muslim underpinnings are also becoming worryingly evident.

In April 2023, the NCERT removed all references of India’s first education minister and Muslim leader Maulana Abul Kalam Azad from 11th grade political science textbooks in a section about the meetings between 1946-1949 to draft India’s constitution. “They only removed the reference to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. How will omitting only four words reduce the load on the students? Their only aim is to invisibilize the names of Muslims from all public spaces such as roads, stations and now textbooks,” said Aditya Mukherjee, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a leading central university in Delhi.

Mukherjee says this is not the first time the RSS has tried to change India’s textbooks.

“The first time RSS had an influence over the government was in 1977 when a non-Congress government was formed for the first time in the country. It was at that time when the organization first demanded to change the textbooks. But people were not scared to speak up at that time and they protested. Then, in 1999 when the BJP government was formed at the center, RSS again demanded changes in India’s textbooks. A large number of India’s intellectuals and academicians including me as well protested against this and their demands could not be implemented. The reason they wanted to do this for so long is because history plays a very important role in fanning communal tensions. They want to dehumanize any mention of Muslims in our textbooks,” a worried Mukherjee said.

The educator Pawan also expressed his concerns about the implications of these changes, especially for millions of low-income students whose only source of information is government-published NCERT books. “As an educationist I know the sanctity of NCERT textbooks is very high especially in small cities where students cannot afford to purchase any other books than the NCERT. So changing something in these books with an agenda means generations after generations will learn that and this will create a chain reaction,” he said.

Hiding the Truth from an Upcoming Generation

Echoing these concerns, Apoorvanand said that a large portion of the population will grow up studying NCERT books and will be misinformed throughout their lives.

Nitin (name changed to protect identity), a teacher at one of the schools run by RSS in Delhi, said the changes this government is bringing to the textbooks are in line with RSS propaganda. “RSS already feeds this propaganda in the young minds through their booklets in their schools. What they were not able to achieve before 2014 was changing India’s textbooks according to their propaganda. With a thumping majority for the BJP, they are able to do that now,” he said.

Nowhere is this change more evident than in the students themselves. Seventeen-year-old Sumit Jaiswal just graduated from his high school. When he was studying, he read about the Babri mosque’s demolition by far-right Hindu nationalists in his school textbooks. Now, he worries that his sibling won’t be able to know about this major act of violence and political upheaval from her school textbooks.

Jaiswal sighed and said, “The Babri mosque demolition was one of the major political events in the 90s. It influenced our understanding of religion and secularism to a large extent. Students my age still take everything written in NCERT books as gospel truth. I am worried that those studying now, such as my sister, won’t be able to learn about this event from their textbooks. It looks like they are trying to prevent young minds from learning about this major illegal act.”

As students such as Jaiswal are worried about this rightwing shift in India’s education system, India’s students find themselves at a crossroads with a massive ideological shift staring at them. Unless more people push back, the country’s educational system could shape India’s future by rewriting its past.

Sabah Gurmat is an independent journalist and researcher based in New Delhi, India.

Kaushik Raj is an independent journalist based in New Delhi, India. 

The post How the Hindu Far-Right is Overhauling India’s Schools and Textbooks appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: curiouscraig.net)

Miller’s Organic Farm, located outside the village of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, looks like all the other farms that dot the winding country roads surrounding it. A simple black mailbox marks its entrance, and an unassuming white house sits at the end of a long driveway, bookended by fields where handsome horses roam and lazy cows graze. But despite the tranquility of the scene, this typical-seeming Amish farm is actually the center of a political maelstrom that has been roiling for almost ten years.

The controversy began in 2014, when two people became sick after drinking dairy products that food inspectors traced back to Amos Miller’s farm (one of them ultimately died; Miller disputes it was as a result of consuming his products). When the USDA investigated his facilities, they discovered that Miller was slaughtering and processing meat from his animals on the premises and not in a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse, a violation of food safety laws. Ultimately, Miller wanted to continue this practice as well as produce raw milk––laws around the production of raw milk and cheese vary from state to state, with Pennsylvania allowing producers to sell it, provided they obtain a permit and their products undergo frequent testing, both things Miller wouldn’t do. His customers, he said, came to him because they wanted natural products, and the government would force him to use myriad chemicals in the production process (for example, washing meat with chlorine after slaughter). The government, meanwhile, maintained it simply wanted to bring Miller’s operation into compliance with federal food safety laws, a feat many other local Amish farms managed.

A few decades ago, the Miller story probably would have faded into obscurity, federal regulations around the interstate sale of dairy products being few people’s idea of excitement. But as the farmer’s entanglement with the FDA and court system dragged on through the Trump presidency and into the Covid years, a curious thing happened: he was embraced and championed by a ragtag coalition of people who, somewhat improbably, found themselves huddled together under the same political umbrella.

You might describe some of the farmer’s champions as Paleo QAnon, a male-dominated group for whom food reflects ideas about traditional gender roles, particularly masculinity, and the corruption of contemporary Western medicine, among other things. Other supporters are health proponents who are hyper-scrupulous about chemicals lurking in grocery store fare, whose views on animal welfare and nutrition aren’t that far removed from those held by liberal vegetarians like Jonathan Safran Foer and Peter Singer. Many are Evangelical Christian homesteaders who moonlight as YouTubers; still others are rank and file Fox News fans, who see in Miller’s story the rage-inducing creep of the nanny state.

It could be hard to make out what Miller thought of the hoopla. Due to Amish reluctance to be photographed or engage in self-promotion, he has made few media appearances, though he was interviewed by Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine activist, on his podcast The High Wire, and lent his voice to a “mini-documentary” produced by the Lancaster Patriot, a Christian publication that bills itself as “leading a Movement [sic] to restore truthful and ethical media in Lancaster County.” While footage of pastoral landscapes rolled and soppy string music played in the documentary, Miller spoke, in characteristic taciturn Amish style, about his plight. “I’m not against government. We need government,” he said of his apparent adversary. “But when they try to hide the truth, that’s when I take my stand.”

Though his meat processing formed the foundation of the case, it was Miller’s raw milk that proved the most galvanizing. His customer base and supporters believe that pasteurization removes many of milk’s nutrients and that, in its raw state, milk can alleviate symptoms of depression, infertility, autoimmune disorders, and autism, among other conditions. Health authorities say there is scant evidence for this, and that the bacteria present in unpasteurized milk can cause illness and even death.

In August of 2022, Miller’s story got a major boost when it was featured on Tucker Carlson Tonight. “So they went after gyms, organic farmers, and churches,” Carlson said to his guest Jeremy Loffredo, a Miller champion and investigative journalist for right-leaning Canadian publication Rebel News. “So maybe they’re against anything that’s wholesome and edifying, that makes you stronger and healthier and in favor of anything that diminishes you and makes you more dependent?” Afterward, the online discourse about Miller became even more heated: “This is a disgusting abuse of power,” read a typical comment under a post on Food Safety News, which has run pieces critical of Miller. Another post proclaimed, “These ppl [the government] DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU!” At one point, his supporters collectively raised more than half a million dollars for him, hoping to help Miller’s businesses stay afloat while he was barred from selling goods and to help with his legal fees.

(Image source: modernfarmer.com)

In court, Miller tried a number of strategies. At one point he argued that he sold only to members of his “private membership association,” which he thought meant (erroneously) regulations didn’t apply to him. He also tried to characterize himself as a “sovereign citizen,” a pseudo-legal label sometimes used by individuals to claim they cannot be subject to laws without their consent. He had a court-appointed attorney named Steven LaFuente, but the two repeatedly tried to part ways, though the judge refused to allow it until Miller found adequate representation. Eventually, he retained the counsel of Los Angeles-based tax attorney Robert Barnes, whose previous defendants included Alex Jones, Kyle Rittenhouse, and Amy Cooper, the so-called “Central Park Karen.” (While Barnes played a role in Rittenhouse’s defense team, he didn’t end up defending him at trial.)

“This case is fundamentally not only about preventing Amos Miller from farming the way his religious community traditionally farms,” Barnes said in an interview with lawyer-turned-YouTuber David Freiheit. “It’s also about ordinary people getting to decide what I put in my body.”

But amidst all the national attention, there was one group conspicuously missing from Miller’s growing legion of fans: the Amish themselves.

***

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where Miller lives, is home to the world’s largest settlement of Amish, a religious group with its roots in the Radical Reformation, whose core beliefs include adult baptism, pacifism, a cautious attitude towards technology, and simplicity (the oft-invoked moniker of Amish and other Anabaptists like Conservative Mennonites, “Plain,” refers both to their spiritual restraint and their modest dress). On a visit to the area in the foggy early days of April, one can stop at a multitude of roadside produce stands selling duck eggs, soaps made of goat milk, and delicacies like homemade root beer and soft pretzels. The seemingly endless verdant fields of soy and corn crops might give a visitor the impression of a totally agrarian society, even though, owing to rising land prices, population growth, and agricultural consolidation, only around a third of the Amish here now make their living farming, a decline that began decades ago and has caused communal anxiety as it has accelerated.

Despite rarely interacting with them, many Americans see the Amish as the embodiment of rustic purity, Christian American values, and––somewhat paradoxically––government refuseniks, owing to widespread (and largely false) beliefs that they refuse to pay taxes or be vaccinated. This is the Platonic Amish person that Miller’s supporters are invoking when they repeatedly mention his religious affiliation; only occasionally does it come up that his community has not publicly rallied behind him. As the well-known farmer Joel Salatin, a friend and confidant of Miller’s, put it on his podcast Beyond Labels in September of 2022, “They now see him as a black sheep, a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, a rebel… He’s Joan of Arc. He’s out there on his own.”

But the Amish are more heterogenous than the stereotypes, and their beliefs do not neatly conform to the ideas many project onto them. For example, as strong believers in the separation of church and state, the Amish have a gentler relationship with the government than many might expect; even in moments of discord, the Amish practice “nonresistance” rather than acts of civil disobedience, such as protesting. In a popular community handbook entitled 1001 Questions & Answers on the Christian Life, the authors, an unnamed group of Amish laypeople and clergy, insist that their duty is to “be respectful to the government at all times… instead of complaining, we should express our gratitude, live in quiet obedience, and pray for our rulers.”

The Amish also typically shy away from using the court system; they will defend themselves legally if necessary, but usually won’t bring court cases themselves, a notable exception being the landmark 1972 Supreme Court case Wisconsin v. Yoder, which exempted Amish children in Wisconsin from attending public high school. But even in the cases of defense, a protracted and combative court case like Miller’s might raise eyebrows. “If, from the Amish perspective, he’s been given a negotiated way to deal with this other than in the courts, and he’s not taking it, there would be questions raised as to why,” says Steve Nolt, professor of history and Anabaptist studies at Elizabethtown College.

The idea that the Amish, as a matter of faith, adhere to a more natural approach to agriculture than secular farmers, which Miller’s supporters often cite, is also not entirely accurate. Though it’s a stretch to call it theological, their relationship to the land does have echoes of spirituality; as the eminent scholar John Hostetler, who was raised Amish, wrote in his landmark book Amish Society, “As in the Hebrew account of Creation, the Amish hold that man’s first duty is to dress the garden.” But that doesn’t mean their farming has historically been more organic, nor is there a specific theological idea that they should farm their crops or slaughter their animals in particular ways. “There certainly are Amish people who’ve gotten involved with different health food movements or raw food movements, some of them for health reasons, some of them maybe for organic and anti-pesticide, more natural-type reasons,” says Nolt. “But there aren’t explicit religious codes or rules for handling food,” akin to kosher or halal rules for Jews and Muslims.

As a food safety expert with Penn State Extension, Jeff Stoltzfus works mainly with Amish and Conservative Mennonite vegetable growers, helping them to meet the regulations set out in the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011. In the past fifteen years, he says he’s seen a growing number of Plain farmers pursue organic certification for their products, a process that requires voluntarily submitting to investigation, a move in tension with the idea of the Amish as anti-regulation. This is partly a savvy business strategy, as certified organic products can be sold wholesale for higher prices. “They obviously can’t go out and buy ten more farms,” he says, referring to the Amish preference to keep their enterprises small. “So they look for other opportunities. [Going] organic is one of those opportunities that they’ve found that fits their lifestyle.”

Casey Spacht, Executive Director and founder of Lancaster Farm Fresh Co-op, an organic cooperative with over 100 farm members, many of whom are Amish, says that in fact, the Amish were just as reliant upon chemicals as secular farmers until fairly recently. “Most Amish who farm, they’re not doing it to be organic,” he said. “They’re doing it because they want to stay at home with their family.” (Spacht says Miller, who is not a member of the co-op, is an acquaintance and a “good guy,” says he isn’t personally worked up about the issues Miller is arguing with the government about: “I’m fighting for farms not to become parking lots.”)

Stoltzfus says the Plain farmers he works with don’t seem to be obsessing over Miller’s plight––“I’m not necessarily privy to their supper table discussions,” he says, but it’s “not something they’re fixated on”––and that overall, they have no more difficulty meeting standards than others. “I worked with as many non-Amish growers that struggled with the fact that we have another regulation to deal with than I did with Amish,” he said, though he stresses that the Amish are not monolithic.

Conversations with Amish farmers and agricultural workers do reveal a wide variety of opinions about Miller (the Amish generally shun publicity and are reluctant to use their names in print). Some told me they had only a vague idea of the story; others implied the drama was bad publicity for them. “It’s a shame,” said an Amish person who runs an outfit selling canned goods, most of which are produced under the auspices of the state agricultural authority. Others, however, took Miller’s side. “It’s terrible,” said a twenty-five-year-old who grew up on a dairy farm but whose family sold their herd years ago when it stopped being a viable source of income. “Because he’s making good food, right?”

This last view is one that might be on the rise. Though it’s hard to quantify, Nolt says he has sensed a change in certain corners of the Plain world in recent years. “There’s this kind of unsophisticated idea that’s gone to seed of like, well, we’re exempt from everything,” he says.

Even in insular communities like the Amish, the bitter national dialogue has a way of trickling in. They’ve been specifically targeted by outside anti-vaccine advocacy groups––Nolt cites an ad in a local publication frequently read by the Plain community, using an illustration of a buggy crash as a visual representation of a Covid vaccine––and wooed by the Republican party. Though they historically don’t vote in national elections and stay far away from the political fray, the percentage of eligible Amish voters who showed up at the polls in 2016 jumped to nearly 20%, which Nolt calls “really unusual.”

On a visit to the area in 2022, I looked out the window at my Amish host’s home and saw something that I took as a potential harbinger of something odd and grim: a Trump 2024 sticker, on the back of a wheelbarrow.

***

Miller and the government came to an agreement in late 2021 that, in exchange for Miller paying a series of reduced fines, both to ensure further compliance and to reimburse the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service for their costs, he would not face any jail time for contempt. It appeared he held up his end of the bargain, and the situation seemed resolved in early 2023.

But the détente was fragile: on January 4, 2024, state officials raided his property, citing reports that linked his milk products, including the seasonal favorite eggnog, to foodborne illness in minors from New York and Michigan; the Pennsylvania Attorney General announced they were suing Miller, and, in a complaint they filed, called the government’s efforts to get Miller into compliance “exhaustive.”

Within hours of officials entering the Miller farm, supporters had rallied online, organizing prayer circles, lobbing off incensed tweets, and penning angry blog posts. Yet another fundraiser was started, this one on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding platform, organized by Chris Hume, the managing editor of the Lancaster Patriot. “Amos Miller Under Attack AGAIN,” read the banner headline, underneath which was a picture of three state officials carrying coolers out a door under the watchful eye of four Amish men in signature garb, looking slightly downtrodden. A goal of $150,000 was set. In less than three weeks, it had exceeded expectations.

Outside the first court hearing on March 2 in Lancaster, a crowd––drawn in part by Robert F. Kennedy Junior, who encouraged people to attend on X (formerly Twitter)––held up signs that read “FDA GO AWAY” and “Food Freedom”; one person chanted “give me salmonella or give me death.” And this time, mingling amongst the group, handing out farm fresh eggs, was a group of Amish men wearing traditional straw hats and beards, just like Miller’s.

Kelsey Osgood has written for The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Time, among other publications. Her first book, How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia, was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program; her second book, on religious conversion, is due out from Viking Penguin in March of 2025.

The post An Amish Farmer’s Court Case and a Curious Coalition of Rightwing Supporters appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Since 2020 I have been informally tracking the number of colleges and universities that have closed their religious studies departments, or stopped offering religious studies as a major, or ended their graduate programs in religion. Typically, institutions justify these closures for the same reason: not enough students are majoring in religious studies and the institution needs to cut costs somewhere.

The downsizing of religious studies departments did not begin in 2020. The humanities have been under attack from conservative trustees and state politicians for decades. But the pandemic provided a convenient excuse to shutter or greatly reduce religious studies offerings when overall enrollment numbers declined at several schools.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

But therein lies a critical problem: as institutions eliminated or decreased their religious studies courses over the past several years, a massive Christian nationalist movement was underway to overturn Roe v. Wade, to put evangelical and conservative Catholic judges in life-long judicial positions, to siphon tax money to private Christian schools, to demonize transgender people, and to refashion the United States into an avowedly Christian country. And as that has been happening, fewer students have been exposed to the analytical tools of religious studies, to identifying how religion functions in society, to understanding the myriad ways religion influences people, and to seeing how politics shape religious communities.

At the same time, religion is not only a matter of pressing concern within the United States. Removing religious studies courses means less students have been learning about Hindu nationalism in India, the spread of Pentecostalism in Latin America and its effect on global politics, debates on the place of Islam in Muslim-majority countries, and much more. Without access to the academic study of religion, our students – our future leaders – are ill-equipped to understand the world or to one day lead it.

Of course, religious studies classes will not, in and of themselves, solve the problems of rising Christian nationalism or politicized religion. But a healthy democracy does not benefit from fewer people learning about religion’s many roles in society. And one could reasonably argue that things like Christian nationalism gain strength when less people have spent dedicated time studying and analyzing how religion influences the diverse cultures within a country, and how religion shapes people’s politics.

For this reason, I am especially proud of the work we do at The Revealer and at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, and our nearly 21-year-commitment to examining and talking about religion in meaningful ways. Our May issue of The Revealer is a case in point that highlights the diverse ways religion is of significance around the world.

The May issue opens with Kelsey Osgood’s “An Amish Farmer’s Court Case and a Curious Coalition of Rightwing Supporters,” where she explores a legal battle between an Amish farmer and the government that has brought together a sizable and curious collective from the political far right, anti-vaxxers, and conservative media, and she investigates what this merger portends. Following that, we head to India where, in “How the Hindu Far-Right is Overhauling India’s Schools and Textbooks,” Sabah Gurmat and Kaushik Raj report on how the Hindu-nationalist ruling party is re-writing school textbooks to erase Muslims and to instill young minds with a Hindu nationalist perspective. From there, we look to Myanmar where, in “Reviving Burmese Nat Shrines to Protect Myanmar’s Mount Popa National Park,” Bikash Kumar Bhattacharya investigates how environmental activists are re-popularizing indigenous spirit worship as a way to sacralize nature in order to combat the climate crisis. After that, we return to the United States, and in “Queer and Religious in the Midwest,” Emma Cieslik offers a review of the documentary We Live Here: The Midwest, and reflects on the place of queer Midwesterners in states where battles over LGBTQ rights are raging. And, in “Muslims in American Media,” an excerpt from Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media, Rosemary Pennington considers how some recent depictions of Muslims in popular culture offer much needed and greatly improved perspectives of Islam in the United States.

The May issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Muslims in Pop Culture.” Rosemary Pennington joins us to discuss how media depictions of Muslims have changed in recent years. We discuss how some Muslim performers have used humor to present a more robust picture of Muslim life, what we should make of the depictions of Muslims in shows like Ms. Marvel and Ramy, and what the place of Muslims in pop culture reveals about Islam in the United States today. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As I reflect on the range of topics in this issue, I wish more people had access to quality religious studies classes and information. But, of course, more religious studies courses will not solve all of the problems we face today or the rightward turn in global politics. After all, alongside the downsizing of religious studies within academia is the elimination of journalists at countless publications who cover religion. But a greater commitment to, and financial investment in, religious studies courses and religion journalism could contribute to more people possessing information about religion and the analytical abilities to not only notice religion’s strong presence in society, but to engage in more nuanced discussions about it. Those of us who want a healthier democracy and a society with greater equality should care about this. The Revealer is committed to doing its part, and we will continue to provide a space for academics, journalists, and freelance writers to share their insights about religion with all of you.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Higher Education’s Downsizing of Religious Studies appeared first on The Revealer.